HAPPY PI DAY!!!

Ok I have to get my geek on. Today is the official day for that pesky little number that we have to use to determine the diameter of a circle 3.14!! Here are a few little tidbits of history about PI

The ancient Babylonians generally calculated the area of a circle by taking 3 times the square of its radius (=3), but one Old Babylonian tablet (from ca. 1900-1680 BCE) indicates a value of 3.125 for pi.

Ancient Egyptians calculated the area of a circle by the following formula (where d is the diameter of the circle): This yields an approximate value of 3.1605 for pi.

The first theoretical calculation of a value of pi was that of Archimedes of Syracuse (287-212 BCE), one of the most brilliant mathematicians of the ancient world. Archimedes worked out that 223/71 < < 22/7. Archimedes’s results rested upon approximating the area of a circle based on the area of a regular polygon inscribed within the circle and the area of a regular polygon within which the circle was circumscribed.

A novel way to compute pi: An eighteenth-century French mathematician named Georges Buffon devised a way to calculate pi based on probability. Buffon’s method begins with a uniform grid of parallel lines, a unit distance apart. If you drop a needle of length k < 1 on the grid, the probability that the needle falls across a line is 2k/. Various people have tried to calculate pi by throwing needles. Depending on when you stop the experiment, you can obtain a reasonably accurate estimate of pi.

The symbol for PI was introduced by the British mathematician William Jones in 1706, who wrote:

3.14159 =

This symbol was adopted by Euler in 1737 and became the standard symbol for pi.